The Cactus League: A Novel

by Emily Nemens

  Audrey and Michael split their wine like they do their steaks, and after sharing a bottle of it, Michael is feeling good. They eat a slice of key lime pie for dessert, and Michael leaves the waiter a nice tip. When they get up to leave, Audrey goes to freshen up in the ladies’ room, and Michael steps outside for some night air. Since sundown the temperature has dropped twenty degrees, and a breeze, full of acacia blooms, is blowing cool and sweet.

  He is enjoying that fine air and the feeling of a premium steak settling in his stomach when what does he see but a Cadillac—his Cadillac—parked illegally in the handicap spot? He walks slowly around the vehicle, his throat getting thick as he reaches the back bumper. His vision clicks across the plate’s letters and numbers: they match. The thief even kept the Lions license plate holder—that takes some nerve. Through the window tint he can see the back seat, littered with to-go containers and kids’ stuff—more of Alex S.’s homework? It must be hard for that boy to be upended so. Moving from empty home to empty home. But still. Michael’s been upended, too. These visitors destroyed his home, his pride, his sense of security.

  Michael straightens. What would Joe do? He flits through the options, the car going blurry before him.

  Joe might’ve called the cops, given them an earful. And Michael could chew out the Scottsdale PD: they couldn’t find a stolen car that has been right under their stinking noses the whole time? Not that reporting it would matter—the car belongs to the insurance company now, Michael saddled with a consolation Chrysler and significantly higher monthly premiums.

  Or maybe Joe would’ve walked back into the restaurant and quietly cased the joint. Gone from table to white-linened table and figured out exactly who had wrecked his place and stolen his prized possession—and then broken a bottle of Scotch over the guy’s head.

  No, no. As much as the idea of catching a thief red-handed makes Michael itch, he knows that isn’t right—Joe wouldn’t have caused that kind of scene. He might have intercepted his dining companion (gorgeous, of course) at the front of the restaurant, and walked her the long way around the lot so she would not have even noticed the offending car. He would’ve gotten her home safe, then driven down to the precinct and ripped the cops good. In person, not over the phone, so the coppers could see how much better Joe was than them.

  But Joe was a man, too, and every man has his limits. Michael knows the Clipper went through some tough times, bared his teeth, snarled enough to make people wonder what was going on behind that buck-toothed smile. Joe fought with the media, made a scene about Marilyn’s funeral, wouldn’t let Sinatra come. We’re all allowed to lose our tempers when we’ve been pushed too far, Michael is certain of that. Joe’d done it, and Michael feels himself about to go there, too. The car’s paint wavers in the streetlights: black, then blue, then black again. It is too much.

  So, with Audrey still inside, Michael walks across the lot to the Chrysler. He opens the trunk, goes to his bag, and pulls out an old bat. A Louisville ash, on the heavy side. He liked to use it against curve ballers. Michael returns to the Cadillac and stands in front of the car. He adjusts his grip, steps into his stance, and takes a deep breath before starting into a strong, arcing swing.

  The first contact breaks a headlight. The second, square in the middle of the hood, knocks the silver shield out of its seating. Michael can feel the knob of the bat dig into his palm. He knows his hands will be flaring red by the time he is done, but that doesn’t stop him.

  The third hit takes off the side-view mirror, the fourth shatters the driver’s-side window. Michael feels a spray of safety glass ricochet off his blazer and sprinkle down to the asphalt. He swings again and pops out the door to the gas tank. Spider-webs the back windshield. Keeps hitting the rear of the car until both taillights are shattered and he’s knocked the back bumper halfway off. Peels the antenna from the frame, dents in the rear passenger door handle until there is no way that thing will open.

  Michael doesn’t notice Audrey come out, but then she is there, gaping and gasping like a goldfish out of water. He stops, puts his bat on his shoulder. She doesn’t say anything as he walks over to her. The red-wine flush is gone from her cheeks; her skin is the color of bone. Her blue eyes are wide, sparkling with the kind of wet that comes after a sudden blast of Wisconsin’s winter wind.

  His lovely wife. “You good?” Michael asks her, the blood loud in his ears.

  She replies not with words, but with her head bobbing along the high collar of her coat. Maybe she nods yes, maybe she shakes her head no; in that moment, he can’t tell the difference.

  “Okay, then.”

  Michael takes Audrey around the waist and starts walking them toward their new car. Others have come out of the restaurant; Michael hears a waiter calling after him. But he doesn’t pay him any mind. What is done is done. As Michael weaves between the sports cars and luxury SUVs, he holds the bat in one hand and Audrey in the other. Is he holding her up, or she him? He can’t say. But Michael can feel his wife tremble in his grip, and it just makes him hold her tighter.

  SECOND

  Remember how I said this was a long game? Let’s put it in perspective, consider the history of this place in geological time. Take a look at Salt River Fields’ cleat-pocked outfield and imagine this: the ground under Goodyear’s feet was once a sea, shallow and warm and dotted with coral reefs, clusters of orangey calcium deposits spread like neon inkblots across the seafloor. The water was that impossible, startling blue that makes even an Arizona sky look as though it’s been mixed with a tubful of gray, and sharks swam through the dugouts, finning to the mound and back.

  That should make the pitcher feel better about his visits from the bench: imagine an ancient hammerhead in Coach Stu’s place, three hundred incisors and mad at the world. It’s the first game of the spring season, and the pitcher, a top prospect from Notre Dame a few years back but rehabbing from Tommy John, looks rattled after even a strong whiff from the batter. So out comes Coach Stu with his slow walk, his hands jammed in his back pockets. The boy nods back at the older man, his glove cupping his chin up to his nose as he mumbles some excuse. The leather, his glove a dark red stain, is high enough to cover the quaver of his lip but not the fear in his eyes. Didn’t this kid dominate the ACC? Take the team to Omaha—not the championship, but pretty damn close? Wasn’t he looking good in Salt Lake, didn’t the PT and the team physio say he was strong? It’s the second inning, and he’s quaking like seagrass under a big wave. The scar from his surgery is a bright seam around his elbow, you can’t help noticing it.

  Today, Arizona is littered with shark teeth, dentin-and-enamel fangs lost in the sand. Some are as small as the top joint on your pinkie, others the length of a tall man’s index. You don’t have to go scratching too far below the surface to find one. With a bit of spit and a thumb rub, it’ll still glow white as bone. What’s past is prologue, a murderer once said. It goes without saying, but there’s some drama in baseball, too.

  Enter stage left, Tamara Rowland. Mind you, I’m not pinning all that’s to come on Tami—she’d argue, Wrong place, wrong time, rotten luck. And she’d have a point. In our profession, we try to be objective, and I’d like to give Tami the benefit of the doubt. Jason had plenty of mess before their first gin and diet, and he made more than a few bozo moves on his own. The scope of the mess is still unclear, but I know for a fact that Jason has been in Arizona for three weeks and he’s never once used the front door to his Arizona home, even as Liana gets up and goes to school every day, teaching a bunch of snot-nosed first graders at Sandpiper Elementary. And it wasn’t just Michael’s memory, there is a batting cage in Jason’s backyard—so why is he working out at Salt River?

  Last season he was fine, but this winter the line started going shaky. Three months of paparazzi photos, and not one with Liana by his side. Sightings in Vegas, look-alikes in Atlantic City. His California house is on the market, as is a flood of memorabilia. Nobody’s connected the dots, but I have a mind to.

>   Look, I said “we” and “our” like I’m still part of the corps, like they didn’t buy me out when the paper took its most recent nosedive that sad day, two Februarys ago. Isn’t half my pension concession enough? I’d said, not wanting to turn over my creased and cracked credential, the laminate so familiar it felt like a second skin. But my new boss, some dot-commer who looked younger than my son, shook his head no. He could not condone misrepresentation, he said with a holier-than-thou sniff.

  What does a sportswriter do without his badge? Loiter around the parking lot, that’s what, watching for players to come out of the clubhouse, hoping he can launch a question over the heads of the shortstop-size kids waiting for signatures, their uncapped Sharpies waving (don’t wear a white shirt). He’s not a hell of a lot different from Tamara Rowland, truth be told—yesterday, I spied her sitting in the shade, a few yards away from my own perch.

  And in watching Tami take the stage, I can assure you it isn’t “wrong place, wrong time” as it is happening. To get Jason Goodyear in her thrall, to share a meal with him, to have their bodies close, to imagine them even closer is a thrill. She’s not thinking about ripple effects, not thinking about dominos—she’s mooning over his sapphire eyes then hoping for dinner then watching the landscape in the moonlight then wondering at how much cash is in the till. But there are those encounters, in baseball and in life, that send every sort of tailspin into motion, and with their meeting, Tami might just’ve sent our man whirling.

  PROSPECTS

  Tamara Rowland knows only the rookies hang out by the exit. Done-up divorcées, new-to-Scottsdale cocktail waitresses, ladies in from Single-A-affiliate sorts of towns—places so small they don’t know any better. Tami could find half a dozen of them squeezed into the line of four-footers, grubby-fingered little boys with dirt under their nails and summer freckles just starting to blush. Nearby, but probably not attentive enough, the kids’ bored-looking fathers hang back in the shade, thumbing phones and tugging on their belts. Tami knows not to be distracted by these men: doesn’t matter if they’re handsome in that midlist-Hollywood way or if they’ve got a whiff of Silicon Valley about them—these guys are still mentally in California, booking dot-com deals or toothpaste commercials, thinking about something, someone, far away. After all, the boys-only trip to watch Lions spring training is as much a gift to the woman waiting back home (a quiet house for three straight days, a weekend for brunch with girlfriends, a free afternoon to call her mom) as it is a dose of father-son bonding.

  Also queued up by the players’ exit: the too-pushy teen and preteen boys, pudgy middle schoolers and undersize underclassmen who bike over from the local schools, just as soon as the final bell rings. Zitty, awkward guys who’ll never make it, definitely not with girls, and unlikely even into the ranks of the JV squad. Equipment manager, maybe. Without better prospects, they throw their hearts into this, baseball fandom, and the signatures they might catch as athletes depart the stadium. Tami feels for these boys, remembers how touch-and-go it was with her son Connor, before he’d shot up and thinned out and learned that no woman likes a guy who makes fart noises for fun.

  The only group that can overcome the bad vibes of loitering at the players’ exit are the sorority girls from ASU. A couple of times a season she’ll spot a lithe pack of them, watch them giggle and wiggle their way up to the front. If the air could go out of a sky the way it goes out of a room when a busty Kappa Alpha walks in the door, that’d be happening in this Arizona parking lot, the aforementioned teen boys going twitchy at their proximity to young, nubile sex. These girls, tan in their tiny denim shorts and bleach-white spaghetti-strap tanks, pay the fanboys no mind. They know what they’re dealing: quicker than a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour fastball, a blond coed will get any ballplayer’s attention. There’s no hope for anyone else the days they come to the stadium. These girls could be standing behind the outfield Port-O-Lets, covered in sod and chew juice, and the players would still stop and notice. Not that she likes it, but Tami understands it’s the natural order of things.

  Now Tami won’t deny that she’s waited for a player to emerge from the locker room; of course she has. She learned this game the same way anyone does: by misjudging balls, by swinging and missing. But the woman who just waits there, right along the rope, thinking that her doe eyes will make him notice: that’s a rookie mistake. Everyone else has learned better.

  * * *

  People from up north think that all desert is the same, but Arizona mornings are different from those in Texas, and Tami loves the way the sun creeps over the McDowell Mountains with its sparkly fingers of white-gold light. Her place is a half mile from where the foothills go steep, but the elevation is enough that it cools off every night until early April—another difference she is thankful for. So on this late February morning, it’s still chilly when she gets up. She pulls her kimono tighter across her chest as she pads downstairs.

  Hers is a nice kitchen: granite-topped island, triple-bay stainless sink, pendant lighting, an intricate backsplash. Tami grabs a grapefruit from the fridge, a knife from the drawer. The inside is always brighter than she expects. Halves, quarters, eighths.

  The phone rings. Tami thinks Texas could be calling, if something bad happened to one of the boys, or one of their boys, or that little girl, Adelaide. But she’s not on the top of anyone’s speed dials, hasn’t been for a while. It’s probably Joanne. She’s a troublingly early riser, a habit that’s only gotten worse since menopause.

  “What are you up to today?” Bingo—Joanne. She’s got this low, husky voice. Old guys—coaches and veteran pitchers and the like—go crazy for it.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Tami responds. For a while before meeting Ronnie, Tami had a half-time gig working over at Taliesin West. Mostly the register in the gift shop, but she’d lead tours, too, when the volunteer docents couldn’t manage to make it in. That’s no problem, ma’am, someone will cover for you, she’d say when they called to cancel twenty minutes before their shifts. And, Of course, dear, we’ll see you in May. Have a lovely time in Paris, when their vacations got in the way of the “mandatory” eight hours a month of volunteering. Talk about Snots-dale, Tami thinks, remembering those haughty women swaddled in their linens and silks. She knows as much about Frank Lloyd Wright as any of those wrinkled old bags. The difference between her and them? Less linen, and she has to work for her money.

  “You working?” she says, licking a sticky finger. Yesterday she got her nails done, a bright pink called Bachelorette Bash.

  “At two,” Joanne says. Neither particularly wanted careers down here—who moves to the desert for a job?—so they lean on their alimonies and try to keep their overhead low. But when things got tight for Joanne’s ex, which meant they got tight for Joanne, she landed three days a week at the Whole Foods on Pima. Thirty percent off everything but the meat. It’s great for Joanne and her battery of life-preserving supplements. Tami told Joanne that she could do better, that no one would miss a little something more, but Joanne got all flustered and said she’s too good for funny business. Tami knew she meant too scared, but didn’t push. Joanne keeps Tami in grapefruit.

  She spreads the wedges around a plate and walks over to a set of French doors. “I was thinking I’d go see the Lions game. Check out the new stadium.” This season, the Los Angeles Lions are moving from Scottsdale Municipal—one of the dumpier places a major league team could spend their spring season—into a brand-new complex, just down the road from Tami. Salt River Fields, they’re calling it.

  “Really?” Joanne says.

  Tami knows that tone. When Joanne finishes something, she’s onto another team, no matter what. Doesn’t want to get a “reputation” anywhere. She started with a scarred-up Giants catcher, then went to Peoria. That’s where the two women met, loitering around the Mariners lot, both of them trying to look too good to be there. Joanne spent the spring with a veteran reliever. The year after that, she was in Mesa and met a DH who could put just about anyt
hing in play (never mind that he could barely shuffle up the base path). With fifteen Cactus League teams, she figures there are squads enough. Tami’s not sure what her friend sees in these codgers, near as old as them and back to making the major league minimum. And the drives! It is thirty-five minutes to Peoria without traffic; the Lions’ new compound, built on Pima-Maricopa land, is seven minutes, door to turnstile.

  “Do you think that’s such a good idea?”

  Tami also knows from her friend’s strained voice that Joanne’s eyebrows are trying to make their way up her forehead. Back when she was Mrs. Thomson, she’d had a good deal of work done. It looks nice, except for when she’s trying to move something. Tami’s lucky that way—nothing’s gotten too draggy or droopy.

  “It’ll be fine,” she says. “Besides, Ronnie’s not on the team. He just financed the stadium. He doesn’t count toward your silly one-a-team rule.”

  “What about Hal Moyers?” A few seasons ago, Tami had a fling with the Lions’ veteran curve baller, at least until his wife got wind and stormed in from Los Angeles. He was on a short leash after that.

  Tami is surprised, and not surprised, that Joanne remembers Hal. “That was ages ago. Water under the bridge.”

  “That’s what you think. But ballplayers—motherfucker.” Tami hears a clatter of kitchenware, and then Joanne is muttering far from the phone. “Gotta go,” she says. Joanne’s always been a klutz.

  Tami sets down the phone and steps into the backyard. Ronnie never got around to landscaping, but he dug for a pool and paved a not-small patio. Tami bought a few pieces at an estate sale, a café table and a couple of chairs that make her think of Paris. The yard looks pretty nice, if her eyes don’t wander over to the pool-size hole or the pile of red-orange dirt where the landscaping is supposed to start.